Found in Forbidden Nights
by labonsoirfemme
Summary: In which Robb Stark refuses to trade Jaime Lannister for his sisters, and Jon Snow decides that being an oathbreaker means that he can tell strategy and politics to fuck off and take matters into his own hands. (It's the after, though, that Jon and Sansa hadn't bargained on.) [R L J]


This story is inspired by davosseaworths' AU "Jon breaks his oath to the Night's Watch to be by Robb's side" photoset and Jal80's prompt for someone to write a fic where Jon Snow goes to rescue Sansa from King's Landing. I'll link both in my tumblr post for this fic!

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She wakes up suddenly – her heart pounding and a cold sweat breaking out across her chest. Someone's hand is over her mouth and she thrashes against it, inhaling sharply through her nose to scream until she hears shushing. "Sansa—Sansa," she hears, and it's the accent first that stops her from letting out her shriek, so familiar but faded by time because _no one else here_ has an accent like that, only her, now. "It's alright," comes next and her mind whispers his name.

She grabs his wrist and yanks it from her face, squinting in the darkness at the black shape framed by the curtains of her bed. "Jon? Am I dreaming? Why would you be in my—"

"No, you're not dreaming. Where is Arya? Isn't she here with you?"

Sansa shakes her head. She can see more clearly now—the moon hangs low outside her bedroom window, which she'd left open let the breeze through. There's rustling on the other side of her bed and she digs her nails into Jon's skin. He hushes her, runs his free hand down her arm. "It's Ghost, just Ghost. Lady—"

He feels her shudder under his palm. "Gone. Dead," she whimpers, and Jon wants to ask why, but it's well past midnight and their time is short. He urges her out of bed. "Arya's gone too," she tells him, her toes curling when they make contact with the frigid flagstones. "I think she might have gotten away. She was always sneaking around the sewers and no one has seen her since before Joffrey killed Father."

"She's always been clever," Jon says, and the way that Sansa says _not like me_ makes him feel stupid, so stupid. "Can you get dressed?"

She hesitates, looking up at the dim features of his face. He looks like he's taller, but she is too, now, so she's not sure. "We won't be able to leave. We'll be caught and they'll hurt us."

Her words have a certain, knowing edge, like she'd be able to tell him what _getting_ _hurt_ entails, so he grabs her hands and tugs her up onto her feet. "No, we won't. I got in, didn't I? But _hurry_, Sansa. Robb and Lady Stark are at Riverrun and we need to get moving before the castle wakes and realizes you're gone."

She lunges forward, fisting his shirt, and the momentum takes them backwards into a shaft of moonlight. He suddenly realizes that the last time he'd seen her was the day they all left Winterfell, when she'd taken Joffrey's hand and he'd helped her into the Queen's wheelhouse. Dark circles lie under her eyes now, and the baby fat has been drained from her face, leaving sharp, high cheekbones that he wouldn't have expected from the girl who'd loved lemon cakes. _She looks like Lady Stark_, he thinks, _but like Father and Uncle Benjen, too._

"Robb? Mother?" she asks with wild eyes. "You're taking me to them?"

"Of course," Jon says. "Why else would I come?"

Sansa suddenly laughs. "I just thought I would never leave," she says, her voice high and strained. "I thought I was going to die here, just like Father." Jon's chest feels tight, and if he had the time and the patience, he would let Ghost tear into the Red Keep until blood ran out the windows, like the direwolf had been wanting to do ever since Jon snuck them in through the kitchens. _He can smell the evil here_, Jon had realized. _He can probably still smell Father's blood_.

"Get dressed," he tells her again instead. She nods and untangles her fingers from his shirt to find something to wear. Her nightrail is sleeveless and several hands-breadths too short now, its hem hitting her shins rather than brushing the floor. She fumbles in the trunk at the foot of her bed, feeling for the rough fabric of her green dress. It's easy to slip into, ties at the front, and she leans on Ghost when she slides on her stockings and then into her boots—the ones that she had brought from Winterfell. They're tight, almost painful, but her only other option is the pair of jacquard slippers by the door and even Sansa knows that tightness is better than impracticality on the Kingsroad. Jon is impatient, pacing by the window while she pats on her dressing table for a ribbon to tie off her braid.

"My cloak," she whispers, and a moment later Jon is draping it around her shoulders and urging her forward.

Silently, Jon unbars her door and Ghost slips through first, then Jon takes her hand and pulls her behind him. The two men that had been guarding her door are slumped against the wall, and Sansa nearly falls when her boots slip in their blood. In the torchlight of the corridor, Sansa sees that Ghost's fur is matted with blood from his snout, down his throat and chest, to the tops of his forepaws. _Oh_, she thinks, but she doesn't feel sad. These guards hadn't helped her, not once, just told King Joffrey and Queen Cersei about everything that she did and everywhere she went.

The castle is silent, except for when they hear movement ahead of them and Jon says Ghost's name quietly, sending the great direwolf loping soundlessly into the darkness. Wet gurgles, rending flesh, muffled clangs of armor against stone, and then Ghost returns to their sides, red tongue lolling out of his mouth.

They go through the kitchens ("No one's here," Sansa whispers, and Jon's hand twitches in hers. "Jon, they were just _servants_—" "No—Ghost and I sent them into the cellar until morning." Relief washes over her; Jon is _good_ still, even though he thought nothing of killing all of the guards in the castle, who were servants in a different way) and across the yard, through the gate to King's Landing proper. Jon tugs her into a trot, and even though her feet hurt and she keeps tripping in the dark and her lungs and thighs and sides burn after just a few minutes, she keeps going going going until they reach the Iron Gate. Bodies lay scattered around the turrets, and the door is cracked just wide enough for the three of them to slide through.

A stallion waits in the treeline, his metal bit clacking against his teeth as he chews on some grass. Sansa feels like she's floating and her knees start to shake a bit as they get closer to the steed. _I'm out, I'm out_, she thinks. She looks over her shoulder, expecting to see waves of gold cloaks rushing after them. There's nothing though—just the rustling of the wind through the trees and the crash of the waves against the coastline.

She sits behind Jon, her arms clasped around his waist and holding on for dear life because he keeps the horse at a flat gallop along the Kingsroad until the sun peeks over the horizon and it's possible for them to see more than dim shapes in darkness. He steers them off the road, and they continue through the woods, at a canter when they can, a delicate walk when the terrain gets too rough for Blackfoot (that's what she hears Jon call him) to handle.

Later that night, Jon waits for the lights in a farmer's homestead to be snuffed out before he eases the door to the barn open and helps her into the hayloft. It's awkward at first, laid down next to each other with an empty chasm of space between then and arms stiff at their sides. Finally, she asks him the question that's been stuck in her throat all day—_why did you come? How did you know?_ He's silent for several minutes, and she nearly thinks that he's already asleep, but he takes a deep breath tells her in hushed tones that Robb had been offered a trade by Tyrion Lannister—the Kingslayer for Sansa and Arya—and Robb'd flatly refused.

"So I left," he murmurs. "Robb's the King, not me. I'm already an oathbreaker; I don't need to worry about honor or looking weak in front of my bannermen."

Sansa turns the words over in her mind until the full weight of what Robb refusing to trade one Lannister for two Starks _means_, and she rolls away from Jon, the hay crunching underneath her and poking into her skin. She bites down on her fist to keep Jon from hearing her cry, but she can't do anything about her loud, jerky breaths. Jon sighs and turns to his side, too, and hesitantly puts his hand on her shoulder. "I'm sorry, Sansa," is all he says, and she falls asleep with the taste of salt in her mouth.

No one knows Jon's come; he made sure of it. Jon had stayed quiet while Lady Stark had pleaded with Robb to make the trade, but he'd also seen the way that Robb had hesitated and snuck glances at his other bannermen in the room. Robb'd said that they would sack King's Landing instead and Jon _knew_ that the girls would be long dead before they ever reached the capitol. He'd barely been a member of the Night's Watch long enough to truly own the title, but he'd been around honorless thieves and murderers with the same shifty eyes that Joffrey'd had at Winterfell, back when he'd just been a prince. He'd taken Lord Stark's head without thinking twice about it—did Robb truly think that Sansa and Arya would be safe just because they were girls? Jon would never say it out loud, but Robb may well lose this campaign, still, and why should sweet-smelling Sansa and little Arya pay the price for Robb's pride? So he'd saddled Blackfoot and told Robb that he was taking Ghost hunting, and that he'd be back in time for the council meeting.

They reach Riverrun just past a half-fortnight later, Blackfoot thin and exhausted from nearly a week at a swift pace. Grey Wind is striding the perimeter of the encampments when Blackfoot picks his way across the sandbanks of the Red River, and Jon and Sansa climb up the steep embankment on foot, Sansa nearly falling to her hands and knees at more than one point, gently hauled back up each time by Jon's hand on her elbow. Ghost runs ahead of them and bodyslams Grey Wind in greeting. Sansa sees the high walls of Riverrun jutting into the sky ahead of them, bright white and gray Stark banners snapping in the wind alongside the Tully banners, and she grabs onto Jon before her knees give out underneath her from relief and exhaustion.

"Thank you," she tells him, tears spilling down her cheeks. "Thank you. Thank you."

"Hey, now," he replies, turning her towards him and wiping her cheeks with the back of his hand. "You don't want to be crying like this when you see them." Her hair whips across her face with the brisk wind, tangling in his fingers. She tries to help him, carding her fingers through the bulk of it and holding it back in one fist. The ribbon had been lost two days past, in a hayloft some ways north of Strong Bent. Jon had awakened with Sansa's head on his numb arm and his face pressed into the downy nest of her loose hair, and several minutes of patting through the hay hadn't turned it up. Her face had screwed up in annoyance, but the horizon had begun to lighten and Jon had wanted to pilfer through the farmers' root cellar before they left.

"You're right, of course," she says, sniffing and wiping at her nose in a very unladylike manner. It should have surprised Jon, but he'd known that night in her chamber in the Red Keep that she was not the same girl that he'd known at Winterfell, and nearly a week on the road had only reinforced that. She glances back up at Riverrun, and then down at her tight dress and her dirty fingernails. Jon watches helplessly as her face falls.

"Snow! Where in the seven hells have you been?" one of the soldiers calls out. Jon breaks out of his trance and raises his arm in greeting. The soldier gestures crudely at Sansa and waggles his eyebrows and Jon frowns.

"Run and tell the King and Lady Stark that I'm back and that I have Lady Sansa with me," he orders in the _Lord Snow_ voice he'd taken on at Castle Black and kept in use as one of King Robb's favored councilmen. The soldier's mouth drops open, and after a moment of shock, he turns on his heel and runs back into camp, the two direwolves loping behind him.

Sansa is trying to smooth the wrinkles out her dress, and Jon pats at his tunic, eventually tugging one of his laces free. He pulls his dagger from its sheath at his hip and cuts a generous length of it, leaving his collar open wide across his chest. Color rising in her cheeks, she forces her tangled hair into a braid and ties it off, and then Jon gently takes her hands and uses the tip of his dagger to scrape most of the dirt out from underneath her nails.

"Here," he murmurs gently, licking his thumb and wiping away a smudge of dirt on her neck that her pulled-back hair had revealed. She's recomposed herself: set her jaw and pulled her shoulders back like she is preparing to do battle, so Jon silently offers her his arm and leads her through the encampment.

Lady Stark is in a full sprint down the main hall of the castle when they get inside, Robb close behind, and when Lady Stark screams out Sansa's name and pulls her daughter into her arms, sobbing into her hair, Jon knows he did the right thing to risk both their lives to get Sansa out of the Red Keep. Robb clasps Jon tightly, muttering that he'd thought Jon was dead, but all Jon sees is the way that Sansa's eyes darken when they settle on Robb. _She won't forget_, he knows. _Not for a long time._

Without the need to march on King's Landing for Sansa (or Arya, Sansa tells them by the fireplace, drinking far too easily from the goblet of wine in her hand) they retreat back into the North, dragging the Kingslayer with them. Behind closed doors in the Red Keep, King Joffrey rants and screams and wants to raze the country from Riverrun to the Wall, but Tywin coldly informs him that the Starks had held off the Andals, crushed the Boltons, and had only bent the knee to the Iron Throne when the wings of three dragons had cast a long shadow over Winterfell. Joffrey shrieks that he is the_ KING_, but even a king is no match for three Lannisters that all agree on their love of family. So the Kingslayer heads back south, and cartographers ink their quills, approximate Greywater Watch, and slice Westeros in two.

Lady Stark never thanks him, but Jon didn't do it for her in the first place. He does, however, notice that she encourages Robb to give weight to Jon's council, on account of his time in the Night's Watch, of course, and personally treats with Castle Black to officially break Jon's oath in exchange for fifty of their hostages from the Southern Campaign, as Robb's council has taken to calling it. Sansa keeps Robb at an arms length for a long time, although she takes to Jeyne Westerling quite quickly, especially when the Northern Queen's belly rounds—suspiciously only _afte_r Queen Jeyne's mother leaves Court to return to the South.

She prefers walks with Ghost, and with Jon when he joins them. After several moons' turns, she begins telling him about her time in King's Landing, and it doesn't take him long to realize that she shares this information with no one else. They're safe back at Winterfell now, with Rickon and Bran and easily dealing with the Iron Islands. Robb takes Theon's betrayal worse and more personally than anything else, Jon thinks, but Jon sometimes wonders that Theon may not have had as much choice as Robb likes to believe, so Jon tries to think pityingly of the boy that had learned to swing wooden swords with them. But, for all the quiet and peace that they thank the Gods for, there are times when Sansa talks about Joffrey and Cersei that make Jon wish that it were early morning in a quiet hayloft again, so that he could wrap his arms around her and try to take some of her pain away, like he used to try to press his body heat into her cool and goose-bumped skin.

Sansa dreams of those mornings too, of Jon's solid weight against her side and his slow, deep breaths against her neck, and there are times that she knows that she should feel guilty about the way it twists her stomach in knots when all of the suitors that Robb trots before her barely cause her to flutter an eyelash. He and Queen Jeyne and Mother pick them based on before-Sansa—they are all sweet and clean and don't sweat or get dirty like Jon had after long days on Blackfoot's back or like he does now in the training yard. Their fathers make them shave before meeting the King's most beloved sister, so their faces aren't rough like the underside of Jon's chin, where she'd pushed her face at night when her nose got cold.

But then she remembers the feel of the Kingsguards' mailed fists against her cheeks, distractedly runs her fingers along the scars that peek out above the neckline of her dress, and she doesn't feel guilty at all.

Later, after Daenerys Targaryen effortlessly sacks King's Landing with her three dragons and her "nephew" at her side (everyone, even Sansa, has done the calculations and knows that Aegon Targaryen _can't_ be Aegon Targaryen) and Robb calls his bannerman, determined not to be the second King who Knelt, Howland Reed tells them all that Lord Eddard Stark had brought more than Lyanna's bones home from Dorne; he'd brought her trueborn son as well, on a promise to keep him safe from Robert Baratheon. Neither Daenerys nor Aegon want Rhaegar's presumptive heir in the Red Keep, and Jon has no desire to leave Winterfell, so the North and the South decide to end their differences the way feuding families have done for centuries—with a marriage.

"You don't have to do this," Jon tells her on a walk across the moors with Ghost, after he'd refused to meet her eyes for nearly a fortnight. "We've thought of each other as siblings for so long…" But he's saying it for her benefit, for what he thinks she _must_ feel, because he still wakes up hard some mornings, after dreaming about her thin nightrail in the moonlight of her bedchamber in King's Landing and the way her breasts had strained against her too-small dress the whole way to Riverrun, and only spurred on by Sansa's instant correction to anyone that Jon is only her _half_-brother-cum-cousin.

She eyes him skeptically for a moment, and then shrugs. "How very Targaryen of you," she finally replies with a twist of her mouth, and Jon can't help himself—he laughs. She'd been inelegantly sarcastic as a child, but Jon thinks that her time with Queen Cersei has given her humor a dark refinement, because sometimes the things she says are so brilliantly turned and twisted around on themselves that only Ladies Stark and Mormont cough into their wineglasses, everyone else taking her bland compliments at face value.

They walk a little while longer in silence, until Sansa stops at the top of a hill and tugs her cloak higher on her shoulders. A light snow is falling, a mere precursor to the Long Night that all the prophecies say is coming soon, and Sansa closes her eyes and turns her face into the wind. She's sixteen now, just a hair below eye-level with Jon, and she's worn her hair loose today, letting it fly like a banner of molten gold behind her. Jon waits, because she has this look on her face that he recognizes, one that usually comes before she talks about the Red Keep. "You know that I pray in the Godswood now, right?" she asks, and when Jon nods, she continues: "I started in King's Landing. I couldn't stand to go up the steps of the Sept there—that's where Father was killed. I used to pray for Robb's victory and Joffrey's death…I thought that the only way that I would leave would be for Robb to march his army down and crash into the Red Keep and rescue me. You were there—you know what it's like. I thought it would take tens of thousands of men to save me. I didn't even think about what you did. It was _so clever_ though, Jon. So clever. You could have died; we both could have. I thought that we were going to be caught and killed up until the moment we got to Riverrun. There are still some days that I think that I'm dreaming, and I'm going to wake up and be back in the Red Keep again."

She cuts herself off and turns away. Jon moves closer to her and puts his hand on her arm, barely palpable underneath her heavy cloak. She can feel it though, and leans into his touch.

"You saved me, Jon. You quite literally broke into the capital, stole into my room, and secreted me away under the cover of darkness when _no one else would_."

She's peering up at him with bright eyes and Jon shakes his head, his lips pressed into a thin line. "Sansa, you don't owe me anything for that."

Sansa sighs, exasperated, and turns to face him fully. "Jon Snow, if I felt I owed you, I would have tried to repay you long before now. What I'm trying to tell you is that you're brave. Braver than Robb, and until you told me about what…he said, I hadn't thought that possible. And you're kind, and you have a good heart. And I haven't felt about you as a true sister should for a while, so I'm not about to start now."

There's heat in her eyes when she says the last few lines, and his stomach turns over the same way it always does when he thinks about her and half-forgets that they were raised as siblings. He suddenly realizes that this is the same expression she wore when they danced together at the feast to celebrate the birth of Prince Eddard nearly six moons past. It had been a fast-paced, whirling Northern dance without the polite exchange of partners that Southern dances used, and—yes, he remembers now—she'd been all polite smiles at first, but Jon had been into his cups, happily drunk over the bonny babe with Robb's copper curls and Jeyne's dark skin, and had curled his fingers into her waist with more familiarity than he should have. He'd tugged her roughly against the line of his body as they'd spun around and she'd looked up at him _just like this_ and it was _this expression_ that he'd pictured in his mind later that night when he'd wrapped his hand around his cock.

"Sansa—" he starts, and then stops, because this is all _so_ strange and he's pretty certain Robb would execute him if he admits to any of it. She rolls her eyes and turns to face him.

"I know you think I was japing about Targaryens a minute ago, but I wasn't. I know how you look at me; I'm not blind. And if you look at me like that _and_ still think of me as a sister, than you really must take after your father's family," she tells him with a tilt of her head. Jon feels the heat rise in his cheeks—embarrassment, he realizes, not shame. "I think that you were lying, though, when you said you thought of me as your sibling."

"I've tried to, I have," he protests, because he may be her cousin _now_ but months ago they'd believed that they shared a father and it was certainly a fact that had held a permanent residence at the back of his mind. She smiles gently at him and slips her hand inside his cloak to take his wrist.

"I know," she says. "I tried, too. But I think my soul is bound to you, has been from the moment you pulled me out of my bed in King's Landing, and always will be. I'm quite tired of pretending, Jon, and we don't have to anymore, if we don't want to."

The hope in her eyes is what does him in. "I don't want to pretend anymore, either," he admits in a low voice, and lifts a hand to tuck a stray tendril of bright copper behind her ear. His fingers linger, cupping back of her neck, and his chest constricts when he sees her eyes darken and drop to his mouth. "Sansa," he murmurs, and he hears her shuddering sigh when he presses his mouth to hers. She slides her arms around his waist and presses her body up against his, and _oh,_ she feels even better than she did when he was drunk, or when he could count her ribs against his chest through her thin dress. And he's solid and warm, and feels as filled-out as he looks, and the thought of his body under all these clothes brings a plaintive noise up out of her chest.

"So you'll marry me?" she says into the wind over Jon's shoulder, her breath hitching when his tongue slides along a cord in her neck.

"Of course," he replies, pulling away to meet her eyes with a humorous tilt to his lips. "The continued peace between our kingdoms depends on it."

"Well then," Sansa drawls, "let us pray for a long and _fruitful_ marriage."


End file.
